Why YouTube Will Be Your Marketing Growth Engine In 2018

Why YouTube Will Be Your Marketing Growth Engine In 2018

With the digital marketing realm becoming increasingly competitive, many brands are finding it harder to find a share of voice and more difficult to promote their businesses in front of the right audiences. For many companies, online is still the most important sphere for their advertising efforts. However, standing out from both direct competitors and other advertisers competing across search and display placements has become progressively more challenging.

For the last couple of years, Facebook and Instagram provided a great alternative to traditional paid search and display mediums for brands to engage with their customers. In particular, video advertising allowed for new multi-sensory adverts to be utilised for Ad campaigns. Unfortunately, like traditional search and display, the space has become more crowded and users more desensitised to adverts.

So, where are brands to go now if they intend to increase their exposure online?

Well, YouTube is potentially providing that new frontier for online advertisers.

There are some fairly important and impressive figures as to why YouTube presents so much advertising potential.

According to Google, over 14.6 Million Aussies are watching YouTube for an average of 19H 12M per month!

65% of that time is spent on Mobile.

By 2020 Google expects Video to account for 82% of Global Data usage.

There will be over $42 Billion USD invested into Video by 2020.

This is all well and good, but how does YouTube present a vastly different advertising opportunity to competitor platforms?

Well, the reason is twofold.

Firstly, Google is still the gateway for information for most consumers. 86% of Australians turn to Google for ideas about what products to buy and 85% of people who use Google Search are also on YouTube. With some exciting product releases to roll out in 2018, Google is now making it possible to leverage its Search, Maps, Play and other networks to run highly targeted Video Ad campaigns on YouTube.

Secondly, unlike competitor networks, when people go to YouTube they do so to be engaged with video content – and this typically means that they watch video with the sound on. Video can have significantly more impact when sound is audible and thus this presents advertisers with exciting opportunities.

Google is now offering advertisers the opportunity to reach an entirely new ecosystem of 1.5 Billion leaned in users with the possibility of speaking to those users with the power of video. YouTube can help business use the power of video to engage new customers and drive incremental conversions beyond search and display by leveraging the incredibly strong intent form Google Search and the entire Google network.

Product Roll-Outs

As part of the expansion of the YouTube product suite, Google is rolling out new features available to digital agencies and advertisers.

Custom Intent Audiences:

Currently in Beta, and soon to be released imminently – in full, is the wonderful new feature – ‘Custom Intent Audiences’.

This is a new feature which is somewhat similar to Remarketing Lists for Search Ads but for YouTube. What Custom Intent Audiences allows you to do is:

Advertisers can show YouTube Ads to customers who have specifically searched for products or services in Google Search. For example, if a customer has gone to Google Search and typed in “Mattress Sydney” Google will build an audience (min size 1,000 cookies) which can be remarketed to in YouTube directly based off the keyword search.

A customer would not even need to click your Ad for you to be able to remarket your Ad on YouTube to them!

This is a fantastic opportunity to place a brand message in front of customer with high-level commercial intent, without having to compete with competitors on a typical search result page.

This feature will only be available in the AdWords Next console.

Store Visits:

Another great feature for customers with physical locations and now currently available is YouTube Store Visits.

This feature is now making it possible to measure the offline value of video ads, with near real-time attribution for Store Visits. The data is directly available in AdWords and only requires location extensions.

Infographic: How does store visits work.

True View for Action:

Also out now, Alpha is True View for Action. This nifty little feature allows for clickable ‘Calls To Action’ displayed via a CTA overlay, companion banner and end screen.

As always, Rocket is here to help you navigate and take first mover advantage of digital sphere and video advertising. Get in contact with our team to find out more! Or give us a call on 02 8310 2393.

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by David Roberts

Marketing Technology Director

David’s been around at Rocket for years and completes everything from marketing and social media strategy to handling many of our biggest accounts. Before joining Rocket in the web consultancy team of the early days, David worked as a buyer’s agent for a property development company. Before that he worked in the music industry, managing digital strategy and was one of the first YouTube partners back in the day. He even launched a worldwide music social network site that partnered with major record labels.